EVENTS

Word.

I’m a fan of Yo, Is This Racist? even if the answer is almost always “YES”. This particular Q&A seemed particularly appropriate.

Anonymous asked: Is it racist that my science teacher sucks balls?

Yo, science education in the US is a fucking political mess of a tragedy, but it’s worth sticking around and at least trying to learn how to apply evidence and logic, because bastardizations of science are basically the favorite tool of the modern racist.

(Wait, is my choice of a common black american slang term for the title of this post racist? Dammit, it is, isn’t it?)

Comments

Since the title of the entry is only a vague reference to a culture, is not a reference to any actual person, and does not make any generalizations about any group of people, it does not seem racist to me. But heck, maybe it is racist of me not to think it is racist. I can hardly tell any more.

Not using a full stop would have changed the intended meaning. You sound like the bad kind of copy editor who’s incapable of understanding the author’s intent. Cf. Pullum and The Allusive Butterfly of Love.

And “Jå”, sounding like “yaw”, has been standard Austrian dialect for “yes” for centuries. Since a lot of words used as slang in the US seem to have come from German or Yiddish (which is so similar to older Austrian dialects that I can understand it quite easily), even the US origins of “Yo” are not necessarily black. Could even be Skandinavian. All you would need is the musos to mingle.

That is if it wasn’t meant to be some kind of wry humour, but I’m not smiling nor is my irony metre going off, so my guess is it wasn’t.

Anyhow, I haven’t heard slang language like that since the late 90’s and early 00’s when my brother and his friends were deep into a sub-urban mockery of urban culture. I somehow think that the kids these days are using other slang. Word. Honestly! (That would be exasperation.)

PZ – of course you are racist. You were born white, raised white, and you have a white job. I am a racist in the same way. The best we can do is recognize a potential for bias and try to resist it as much as possible.

But that’s not the point. The point is that I fail to see the difference between saying that being a professor is a “white job”, and saying that it’s a “man’s job”, or that it’s “white man’s work”, or whatever.

There are plenty of black academics, despite their low represenation as a percentage of the whole field, and they are not doing a “white job”.

@23 No i was raised in the American Deep South by a racist asshole during the time of Jim Crow, legally-enforced bigotry, and unspeakable violence against innocent people who asked for nothing except basic human respect. It made me very angry.
@24 I understand what you’re saying and I respect you a great deal, I have difficulty accepting the meme “…everyone has a racial bias,” as a proven fact. I also realize that I am a product of a racist society so I will defer in this instance. After all there is no way for me to prove that I am a not-racist. I will accept being a “not-supremacist, not-bigot” for now.

Peterh: You poor babby. Yep, you just stroll along, minding your own business, and somehow all those militantly politically correct folks take issue with every word that comes out of your mouth, am I right? And then you just stand there and say nothing, and then all those nasty people who don’t look like you or sound like you still get offended, am I right?

I don’t know, Peter, but for some reason you don’t strike me as a reliable narrator here.

@28 Thank you Brownian. I am familiar with the IAT and have actually taken it several times. I do score “white” (positive) but at the lowest numbers. Perhaps my problem with the word “racism” is merely semantic. There should be a different word for someone who “identifies” white than for someone who thinks that being white is inherently superior. A lot of meanings get piled on that one word “racist” as Ing pointed out. I will end my quibble now. I appreciate your forbearance.

Actually I think Marcus’ point is valid, and applies to discussions of sexism too. It would be useful to have a commonly agreed way to clearly distinguish between background-aware, background-blind and bigoted.

Where background = we all have it, we can’t help it, we were raised that way. Everyday sexism, racism, classism, ableism etc etc. But it’s very different if you’re aware of it and and try to work against it, than if you’re just plain oblivious. And even being oblivious is not the same as being actively bigoted. Although they work much the same in everyday life, since intent isn’t magic, one is potentially more educable than the other.

Oops. I just had a #privilegefail up there. The oblivious and the bigoted are much the same in *MY* everyday life, because I am privileged enough not to be afraid of bigots harming me in my everyday life. Not everyone is so lucky.

Yes, there is a pretty big difference between the bystander who helps, the bystander who does nothing, and the actual basher.

Where background = we all have it, we can’t help it, we were raised that way. Everyday sexism, racism, classism, ableism etc etc. But it’s very different if you’re aware of it and and try to work against it, than if you’re just plain oblivious.

We do. Racism, Sexism, Classism, Abelism is the unconscious affect.

Adding bigot to that is for when people are proud or stubborn in it.

It’s actually important NOT to find a more watered down term. It’s important that even the innocuous low level be regarded as negative to defend against. White guilt can be a good thing, or at least better than liberal stubbornness.

I’m not sure the “unconscious affect” is a more understandable term. Or that sexism, racism etc are understood generally to be different from bigotry. And I distinguished 3 classes; but you seem to have 2.

Hmm. I didn’t have any idea that “Word.” was black American slang. I’ve only seen it relatively recently and thought it was originally young people’s internet slang. Like LOLCat speak or “fail”. Huh. Learned something new.

“Word” has been around for a while. Since the 80s at least. I can attest from direct personal experience that white teenagers in predominantly white rural towns in upstate NY were using it during the 90s.

Thanks for the link at #28, Brownian. My IAT score was ‘No automatic preference for African American or European American’. Kind of bears out what I’ve always said: ‘I don’t mind and it doesn’t fucking matter to me what race you are’. I grew up among so many different ethnicities that I really don’t base my judgements of people on race. Idiocy is a different matter.

Umm … given that before that test, I’d have had trouble to guess who is who when shown pictures of both, and what I know of either one’s politics seems equally off-putting, this does not exactly inspire confidence in the test – though the other line seems to be right.

Also, given how often I just plain forgot what exactly I was to select at the moment (and how much time I spent bitching about the test) …

Well, I do admit that I paused once looking at a picture of Romney to remark on how ugly his grin was, in reference to many supposedly-attractive politician grins I remember seeing that just looked ugly (or used-car-salesman-like) to me.

(Incidentally, asking a German how liberal he is on X issue seems rather problematic – first, outside the US, “left” or “progressive” is not usually called “liberal” (that’s used more for politics at least superficially like US “libertarian”), and second, right now, that would be rather ill-defined over here even with corrections. We have at least threefour parties in that general area, and they disagree on a number of points; furthermore, parts of the conservatives sometimes also have opinions in that area … I can answer for concrete positions, but a general right-or-left style question does not have a clear answer.)

I’ve never heard of it, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say it probably refers to the commonly asked question, “If there’s Black Entertainment Television, why isn’t there White Entertainment Television? Isn’t that racist?”

Merely asking the question is racist, since it reveals that the speaker hasn’t thought about–or is deliberately ignoring–the obvious fact that pretty much ALL of the other channels are “White Entertainment Television.”

Whether the question is asked in genuine puzzlement or in maliciousness, will tell you if the speaker is merely a racist or a genuine racist bigot.

I’ve never heard of it, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say it probably refers to the commonly asked question, “If there’s Black Entertainment Television, why isn’t there White Entertainment Television? Isn’t that racist?”